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Hey and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. What are you going to do about
it? Short Stuff.
Yeah, this is called outdated names for people edition.
I guess so. I love, so a lot of this came from the NSA, the National Security Agency,
the one that's been spying on Americans for decades now. They basically hid behind
hobos when they were talking about tramps and bumps, which I assume is what you're talking
about. But they're like according to hobos, this is what this means.
Yeah, yeah. These are old terms used back then. So just know we're not suggesting that
anyone call an unhoused person a bum or a tramp.
No, but specifically, the NSA says that hobos say specifically that a hobo is a traveling
a tinerant worker who wants to work, who also loves to travel and the way that they put
it is a hobo travels to work and works to travel frequently. They're working so they
can save up enough to tie them over through the winter, which they'll take off and they'll
get back on the road. They travel by train by car, however they can. We talked about them
in the hitchhiking episode, if I remember correctly.
And then according to the NSA, according to hobos, the difference between a tramp and
a hobo and a bum and a hobo is that a tramp is also a traveler, but they don't like to
work. They don't work. And then a bum, again, according to hobos, according to the NSA,
neither travels nor works. So there you go. Thanks for putting that all on me.
Well, I mean, you're the one that put this one together. We got to talk about it.
You can't get around. The hobos is what we're going to concentrate
on specifically, as you'll see in a minute here, hobo signs, but the word hobo itself,
no one's really sure where that comes from. There are a bunch of ideas, as always, as
to its origin, some, you know, as usual, make more sense than others. One is HOE, hobo,
make, if you were traveling around working, you might have some farming tools like a HOE.
So you might have been a hobo, which could have become hobo. I say that this may be not
so great. Oh, you're crazy. That's my number one.
Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. All right. Okay, let me hear your pick, then. What's the,
where the word hobo come from? Well, I mean, if I was picking just from this list,
I would go with, because this did start after the Civil War, when there were soldiers who either
wanted to go home and would hop a train or didn't want to go home and would hop a train in the other
direction, but homeward bound, HOBO makes a little more sense to me. Sure. No, I would, I'd
put that one in second. That's number two for you. We have to at least name check the other one real quick.
Okay. So there's one that says that it was basically a shortened version of, hello,
boy. It's just a friendly greeting and that that came to low boy and then low bow and then hobo.
I think that's a terrible idea as well, but it's hilarious to just say those different words
in progression. Yeah, I would also say it's probably not a Latin thing in origin, but there are
some people who say it's from the Latin homo bonus, meaning a good man. I don't think it's that one.
Yeah, I didn't. So when somebody's saying like bonus in the 90s, they were saying like good, I guess
it never occurred to me that they were speaking Latin. Sure, I'm sure that's what was going on.
So, well, let's just set up what we're really talking about here today, Chuck. We're talking about
hobo signs, as I believe you said. And so one thing that hobos have in common is that they like to
travel. They very frequently prefer solitude. And yet they have a camaraderie with one another.
So when you're traveling as you're a hobo and you're going from like town to town and you're saying like,
hey, where can I get work? Where can I get a free meal or something like that? You're met
varyingly with different kinds of attitudes. Yeah. And those attitudes are probably going to
stay roughly the same over, you know, shortage spans of time at least. So because you care about
other hobos and because you don't really meet up with them very frequently, you would leave a
sign. And this is what became hobo signs. There were signs that a hobo left for another hobo
basically saying like, this is a great place to get a free meal. Stay away from this house because
this is where the local cop lives. All sorts of really useful information. And over time,
essentially a codified system developed. Fantastic. What a great setup. Thank you. I appreciate that.
All right. We'll take a break and we'll be right back to talk about what was on these signs right
after this.
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Okay, so we talked about Hobo signs and we're going to start talking about that again
beginning now. Yeah, like you mentioned, Hobo's lived a very early
fairly solitary life. I guess they would hook up with friends every now and then, but
the fact that you're traveling around and you're not all congregating in a big group to tell
one another like, hey, this next town you're coming upon X, Y, and Z, you should know.
They would leave these signs. They were temporary. On purpose, basically, they were like
charco or charcoal because like you said, some certain people might have certain attitudes
about someone coming through town looking for work. There are changes in attitudes.
No, I'm not going to do it. Thank you.
All right, PJ, me above it. And the person who lived in that farmhouse last year
may have been super helpful and need some help, but maybe a year later, they didn't. So that
sign would need to be changed. So that's just sort of a clumsy way of saying, hey, let's not make
these signs permanent because they need to change to convey the most recent information.
Exactly. And so the signs, some of the signs that they developed just making two of it
have sent, like there's a top hat that was the sign that a wealthy person lived there.
A train engine would be a good spot to mark a train. And this one I'm kind of puzzled by
because you wouldn't actually find out if it was a good spot until you were successful or not.
If you were unsuccessful, you wouldn't go back and leave that sign that it was a good spot.
If you were successful, you wouldn't be there anymore to be designed that it was a good spot.
I just find that a head scratcher. But more often than not, oh, there was another one across
said that if you, if you, you know, gin up some religious talk with people who live here,
they'll give you a free meal. I love that one. More often than not, though, they didn't really
have any intuitive connection to what they were conveying the symbols. Yeah, that cross
one is really great because at some point some hobo was not having much luck with the lady
of the house. And then they started talking about Jesus. Would you like a slice of pie?
The guys I go, okay, I got you. Apparently, George Washington was like that, but with horses instead
of religious talk. I'm not going to believe anything you ever say anymore. That one is true. That's
the story from Gilbert Stewart, the famous portraitist, who couldn't get him to become at all like,
like to smile at all. And apparently his horse walked by and all of a sudden George Washington just
opened up, started beaming and talking about his horse and horses in general. So Gilbert Stewart knew
that for the rest of the sitting, he would just bring up horses and George Washington would just be
up and chipper. Yeah, he said, let me flash a smile. Let me see those pearly brown
ones. So all right, so you mentioned a few things it made sense like the top the top hat and stuff
like that. But there were also a lot of symbols in this code that you know, it was sort of the
symbol of the hobo that if you just look at it, it's not intuitive. For instance, a picture of a
chicken that someone has drawn, you might think, hey, this might be place where I can get some chicken.
Yeah, no, no, no, that means you can use the telephone for free.
Boxy you is a good camping spot. Some are just like, where did you get this?
Sideways cross, so cross on its side and a circle and one of the quadrants, the top quadrant,
and then the circle is three dots inside. And that means that there's a doctor that lives there
and you won't charge for medical attention. Like, where would you possibly come up with that?
I don't know. I tried to make sense. I'm sure you did too of a lot of these. And I wonder if some
of them did make sense to the creator or if it was just literally like, hey, we need something.
Yeah, I get maybe they just kept adding to it. They were like, well, this one will be a side
way cross. They're like, no, that's already means there's a satanist that lives there. Okay,
well, what about a side ways cross top of the circle? That's a satanist who loves to talk too
much. All right, what about one with three dots? And they're like, okay, doctor who doesn't charge
for medical advice? Yeah, that's a good one. That's a real one, right? Yeah, that was the one I was
talking about. Oh, that's a sideways cross. Right, right, right. Okay, so there's also a circle
next to a square. Each of them has a dot in the middle. And that means that the man of the house
has a bad temper. Pretty clear. Pretty good. Yeah, a lot of these were like, steer clear or go here.
Yeah, but they just had like an extra little layer of information too. Yeah, the only one that made
any sense was the three perpendicular diagonal lines. Oh, that made sense? Was unsafe. I just
thought it might mean like three strikes is usually a bad thing. Okay. But I don't know. That's
just a guess. Okay. That made more sense than any of the rest of them, I think. So the where
these signs came from is just completely lost to history. Although some people are like, it can
tell you exactly where it came from. We should probably say at this point, there are some people who
don't believe that there ever actually was a codified roughly 50 signs that Hobos used to leave
to one another. There's a group called the Historical Graffiti Society that Atlas Obscurae
profiled some years back. And these people search for those things and they're like, I wish this
would I would be proven wrong because I want to find them. I've never found anything like that.
They think that it's possible that the whole thing was generated by early 20th century media
fascination with Hobo and the Hobo lifestyle. Oh, that is. I mean, I thought that reading of it
was right, but they're just saying that it was just a creation of media. Yeah. So they trace it
back even further to there was a famous Hobo. I can't remember his name, but he wrote a series of
fantastic books that were really popular and they think that the signs were introduced in there.
To me, that doesn't mean that the whole thing was made up. Right. I think that possibly it
wasn't nearly as codified, but they're like, we've never found a single one and we found
they found some in chalk that are 100 years old, but they don't bear a resemblance to this.
Instead, it's usually the first letter of whatever direction they were traveling, their nickname,
and then maybe the year or the date. That's a genuine documented verified Hobo signs. Hobos
definitely used those 100 plus years ago. Well, speaking of nicknames, we kind of have to
mention one thing, right? Yeah. So yeah, John Hodgman, writer of books and
podcaster of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, very famously created 800 Hobo names
and one of his books. And I figured we could just go through a couple of these. Do you have a
list by any chance? No, I have them all memorized. Okay.
Chili mix Wilma Benson. That's not bad. Flee stick.
Tommy Licecom. Let me see. Let me do one more. How about Prostate Davy?
So Hodgman came up with 800 names. That was, I've never talked to him about that. Imagine that was
an arduous and I'm sure he never wanted to do that again. Because I think he also had people
for years thing to create a Hobo name for them and stuff like that. Yeah, for sure.
And you'd be like, no, I'm not doing that. Yeah, fun stuff, though. Just to wrap it up,
there was an actual like there was documented Hobo signs that seemed to have generated organically.
And that it was called war-talking. And essentially it came about in a very specific period of time
in the early 2000s when Wi-Fi started to become ubiquitous. But free Wi-Fi was very hard to find.
And so a Hobo would find some place where somebody had like a Wi-Fi router that didn't understand
how to add like a security key to it. And so there was just free Wi-Fi. So they would leave a little
mark for other Hobos and say like, you can get free Wi-Fi here. And then as people started to get
savvier and add security to their routers, that kind of went away. But simultaneously free Wi-Fi
zones like in some cities now are just completely wired up with free Wi-Fi. Like that kind of grew
in its place. So the whole premise of war-talking lives in a very, very small window of time. I just
find that fascinating. Interesting. I love it. I love it too, Chuck. And I love this short stuff.
And this short stuff is out.
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